Common issues … and suggestions for improvements

humankind

Post navigation

Few days ago I passed by a nearby multinational market chain store and a happy father was waving with a package of potato chips to his toddler infant held in mother’s hand, saying cheerfuly, »Look, I brought this for you.« The kid was happily smiling back.

Yet, another day in the exactly the same store I saw a joyous young family with yet another toddler in mother’s arms, and again the father waving a package of potato chips to a smiling kid, saying: »This is the one you like, isn’t it.«

I asked myself then, »Are we really all enemies of sort to one another, from the conception on? « Some intentionally, and most of us unintentionally. I don’t mean this as an acusation. Enemies have the tendency to mislead and deceive in order to manipulate, exploit and use another being or beings. Lies are among adversaries’ greatest weapons.

Are we really giving one another only what advertisements tell us to give and don’t look outside that advertise box we are captivated, programmed and conditioned in? I mean chips aren’t considered a really healthy food, so consuming it from early childhood can’t be really beneficial. And the same is with many other things, events, issues …a list without end.

I looks like, no matter how long we are schooled, we seem to be are enemies to one another and unaware of it. Maybe we wouldn’t like it, if we would know how we poison and destroy ourselves and the world around us.

At the time I was studying at the university, we were told never to drink alcohol at the time of conception, pregnancy or breastfeeding, because the embryo and later the child eats what mother eats. And the embryo/child feels what the mother feels because the embryo lives in the mother’s body and the newborn is very closely related. They are in fact so closely related that the embryo learns the sound of the mothers’ voice, and a newborn is capable of recognizing it. And the same is true with animals.

In fact, each of us resonates with his/hers own frequency. So, when a mother suffers, for example, the child picks up that frequency, and when she is happy, the kid picks up that one frequency.

But when our minds are tuned to the advertising, then we resonate with the ads frequency. Our minds get filled with their ideas of what to or what not to do. Some 20 years ago I read a book of a Dutch couple, who simply became so miserable that they finally had enough of being constantly told, »Do this, buy this, don’t do this, this is good for you«, and so forth. Part of their feeling of being miserable was that they were constantly chasing what they were told in the ads or on the TV or radio and were constantly underachieving, chasing what they were told to have or achieve in life. So, they switched off the TV and the radio, and soon there was silence around them and from that outer silence they figured they can reach some inner calmness and freedom of choice.

And on the other hand, I remember a book of an extremely successful French copywriter, who asked himself what he was doing only after a man killed himself watching his ad while he was driving.

So, are we all really each other’s enemies on this planet? Is the only mode of existence to be an enemy to others in order to survive?

Or am I maybe wrong? Perhaps, if each person stays out somewhere in the nature long enough to figure out how nature feels like, we’d come up with some other solutions.

Some decades ago I spent a month in the mountains without TV, shops, newspapers, etc. There was occasional ariplane to be heard, cow bells, wind, rain when it rained, and that was all of the daily sounds I have heard there. Before I made myself a meal I had to fetch wood, make a fire and even then it took about an hour and a half for a casserole to be cooked (vegetables were growing in the garden). Every day I was truly tired of all the physical work, but it felt like a healthy tiredness (from all the fresh air and work), and I fell sound asleep when I laid down on my matress. Yet, I didn’t miss anything. When I returned to the town, I cycled to my job and couldn’t figure out at first what was bothering me so much. Later I figured it was noise of the city. Cities are very noisy, believe me.

Most of us don’t read the ingredients content’s on the food packages, and freshly baked bread most of the time doesn’t have it. So, we don’t know exactly what we eat.

Why am I tackling this topic at all, when it is hardly interesting? Well, I guess I’m some antiquity or something like this. Maybe I’m in the years when the world, the so called progress and human endeavors look awkward.

The thing is, that one day I went to a local store and wondered how come that I see so many obese people around me, while there were practically none in my youth. Okay, we were mostly walking to the school and spent afternoons playing outdoors or helping our parents and relatives, neighbors or friends.

So we were moving a lot and burned the so called calorie intake in no time.

But there is yet another thing that passes us unnoticed.

Here. I’m going to list you some of the daily commands from my childhood:

Don’t overeat yourself.

Don’t eat sweets for a breakfast.

Don’t eat sweets before a regular meal.

Don’t eat sweets – it makes holes in your teeth.

Don’t eat too much before you go to sleep.

Drink water, if you are thirsty, or bitter lukewarm yeast&chicory coffee on a hot summer day, or unsweetened tea.

Eat an apple if you a hungry during meals.

Chew the food thoroughly.

Eat slowly. Don’t throw the food into yourself like into a sack.

Looks like these words still resonate in me and compose my diet.

When I look around, it looks like now everything has to be sweet and fast. If we look the packages we bring into our dwellings more closely we might be surprised. I was.

But before that I read a sentence that raised my interest to look this topic more closely. The sentence goes as follows: »At the beginning of the 20th century – before the widespread cultivation of sugar beets and imports of sugar from cane – intake per capita in Europe was below 5 kg per year rising to the 40-60 kg per year seen in Europe today.« (Health in All Policies, Prospects and Potentials, 2006, http://www.eu2006.fi )

Actually sugar is in many products, we wouldn’t expect it in. Sugar is a preservative, but we used it in preserving sweet food, like jams, jellies, stewed fruit, and cookies. Now, if you read the ingredients content’s you can find it in meat, bread and stewed sour vegetables – in many foods you won’t expect to find sugar.

And guess what, now children eat their cereals in milk for breakfast, and a cup of it contains so much sugar as 6 doughnuts, was told on The Doctor’s TV several years ago (sorry, I can’t find the archived file to state the exact time when the show was aired).

This is one side of this scenario. The other is that people producing sugarcane are mostly so poor they can’t afford themselves much more than to eat one raw sugarcane stalk a day. So on one side we have people getting obese and sick from the excessive intake of a product of a processed plant that is actually a medicinal plant. And on the other side we have starving people who survive by the day consuming that very stalk of that plant.